>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost John Troyer and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in tech coverage and this is exclusive coverage from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Usually this time of year it is a little bit overcast, but for the second time the OpenStack Summit has been here, the sun is shining. It has been gorgeous weather but we are in here really digging in and understanding it One of the people I have gotten to know through this community especially, is our wrap up guest today, Sean Michael Kerner, who is a senior editor with eWeek, amongst other bi-lines that you have. Pleasure to see you. >> Great, good seeing you too Stu. >> Alright, so we let you keep on the Toronto Bluejays hat >> Thank you, there we go. >> We have had quite a few Canadians on our program here. >> Well, seeing as how you're here in Canada, it's not all that surprising. >> It's lovely. They have you working on Victoria Day. >> Yeah, that's unfortunate but I will take Memorial Day off in a week, so it works out. >> Excellent. So Sean, for our audience that might not know you, give us a little bit about your background. You've been to umpteen of these shows. >> Sure. I have been with the same publication roughly, I guess 15-16 years at this point. I've been writing before there was cloud, core living and Opensource stuff, networking. And then through the magic of technology, I shifted a little bit to security, which is a core focus for me. I have been to every OpenStack Summit since the San Diego Summit, I guess, 2011. Somebody can correct me afterwards. I did miss the Sydney Summit for various reasons, but yeah, I've been to a bunch of these things, so interesting to see how things have shifted over the years from nothing to certain heights to where we are now. >> Alright, so bring us up to that, as to where we are now. Attendance is down a little bit. They haven't been talking a lot about it but quality I guess is here. Sessions, they've broadened down a bit of the scope. We have been digging into it, but want to get your take so far. >> Yeah, well it's like anything else, there are standard hype cycles, as it were and there's a trough of disillusionment. I wouldn't call this a trough of disillusionment, but when you get to a certain plateau, people just, there'sn't as much interest. In the early days, I remember the San Diego Summit I went to. They didn't schedule it properly. They didn't know how many people they were going to have, and they had to line up around the corner and stuff. That was six years ago, but that is when OpenStack was new. There was no such thing as the Foundation, and everyone was trying to figure out what was what. And, there was no clue at this point. Cloud is a well understood thing. There are competitive efforts or complimentary efforts, as the Foundation would probably like to put it; whether it's CNCF, there's the public cloud and it's different. There is, with all respect to the OpenStack Foundation and its member projects, there's not as much excitement. This in now a stable, mature ecosystem and because of that, I don't think there's as much of a draw. When something is brand new and shiny, you get more of a draw. If they would have put the name Blockchain somewhere, maybe, maybe they would have had a few more. They put Kubernetes in there, which is fine, but no machine learning or artificial intelligence quite yet, though that's a topic somewhere in there too. >> Yeah, John, you've been making a lot of comments this week talking about we've matured and the lower layer pieces just work a bit more. Give us your take about that. >> Sure. That's the way it seems. There wasn't a whole lot of talk about the release, news release, and all the different components, even the keynotes. But, the people we have talked to, both on the vendor and the customer side, they have working production OpenStack environments. They're very large. They require very few admins. They work. They're embedded in telecom and banking, et cetera. It's here and it's working. >> Yeah, that's so something that happened, maybe three cycles ago at this point, because they used to have the release the same time as the Summit and the Design Summit. It was together, so, there was essentially a celebration of the release. People would talk about the release and then they desegrigated that. I think that took a lot of steam out of the reason why you got developers to attend. So, when you don't have the Design Summit, there's this separate open endeavor, there's the forum, I don't quite understand how that works here now. There isn't as much momentum. Yeah, I agree with you. There has been very little talk about Queens. In each of the project update sessions I have been to, and I have been to a couple, there has always been a slight on Rocky, what's coming. I think we are on the second milestone of Rocky, at this point, so there's some development, but at this point it is incremental featurettes. There is no whiz bang. OK, we're going to have flying cars, you know send a Tesla to outer space kind of Earth shattering kind of news, literally, because that's not where it's at. It's just incremental tuck in features in stability and that kind of thing. >> Alright, you talk space and thinks like that and it brings to mind a certain attendee of the program that has actually been to outer space and maybe one of the more notable moments of the show so far. Give us your take on Mr. Shuttleworth. >> Well, I'm a big fan of Mr. Shuttleworth, top to bottom. Hey Mark. Big fan, always have been. He has his own opinion on things of course. Usually in a keynote you don't tend to take direct aim at competitors and he chose to do that. It made some people a little uncomfortable. I happened to be sitting in the front row, where I like to sit, and there was some Red Hat people, and there were some frantic emails going back and forth. And people were trying to see what was going on et cetera. I think, for me, a little bit of drama is okay. You guys go to more shows than I do, and sometimes you get these kind of sales kind of things. But in an open community, there's almost an unwritten rule, which perhaps will be written after this conference, that whether or not everybody is a business competitor or not, is that this is neutral territory as it were and everybody is kind of friendly. In the exhibit hall, you can say this and that, we are better, whatever, but on the stage you don't necessarily do that, so there was some drama there. Some of my peers wrote about that and I will be writing about it as well. It's a, I prefer to write about technology and not necessarily drama. Whether somebody is faster, better, stronger than others, you let the number prove them out. When we talk about Opensource, Opensource Innovation without Canonical, there probably wouldn't have been an OpenStack. All the initial OpenStack reference and limitations are on Canonical. They got a number of large public clouds, as does Red Hat. I think they both have their tactical merits and I'm sure on some respects Red Hat's better and on some respects Canonical is better, but him standing up there and beating on the competition was something that across the 13 summits I have been I have never seen before. One guy I talked to my first OpenStack Summit was in San Diego and the CTO of VMware at the time came up to, VMware was not an OpenStack contributor at the time, they were thinking about it, and he was fielding questions about how it was competitive or not and he was still complimentary. So there has always been that kind of thing. So, a little bit of an interesting shift, a little bit of drama, and gives this show something memorable, because you and I and others will be able to talk about this five years from now, et cetera. >> You talked about something you would write up. I mean part of your job is to take things back to the readers at eWeek. >> Yeah. >> What are the things, highlights you're going to be covering? >> The highlights for me, Stu and I talked about this at one point off the camera, this is not an OpenStack Summit necessarily, they're calling it Open Infrastructure. I almost thought that they would change, we almost thought that they would change the name of the entire organization to the Open Infrastructure Foundation. That whole shift, and I know the foundation has been talking about that since Sydney last year, that they're going to shift to that, but, that's the take away. The platform itself is not the only thing. Enabling the open infrastructure is nice. They're going to try and play well and where it fits within the whole stack. That gets very confusing because talking about collaboration is all fine and nice, but that is not necessarily news. That is how the hot dog is made and that's nice. But, people want to know what's in that dog and how it is going to work. I think it's a tougher show for me to cover than it has been in past years, because there has been less news. There's no new release. There was Kata 1.0 release and there was the Zuul project coming out on its own. Zuul project, they said it was 3.0, it was actually March was Zuul 3.03. Kata Container project, okay, interesting, we'll see how it goes. But a tougher project, tougher event for me to cover for that reason. Collaboration is all fine and nice. But, the CNCF CloudNativeCon KubeCon event two weeks ago, or three weeks ago, had a little bit more news and a lot it's same kind of issues come up here. So, long winded answer, tough to come up with lessons learned out of this, other than everyone wants to be friends, well some people want to be. And, collaboration is the way forward. But that is not necessarily a new message. >> When I think about Kubernetes, we are talking about the multi cloud world and that's still, the last few years, where it's been. Where does OpenStack really fit in that multi cloud world? One of the things I have been a little disappointed actually, is most of the time, when I'm having a conversation, it's almost the, yeah, there's public cloud, but we are going to claw things back and I need it for governments, and I need all of these other things. When I talk to customers, it is I'm going to choose what I put in my data center. I'm going to choose how I use probably multiple public cloud finders. It is not an anti-public cloud message, and it feels a little bit on the anti-public cloud mass. I want to work with what you're hearing when you >> talk to users? >> When I talk to users, vast majority of people, unless it's something, where there's regulatory issues or certain legacy issues or private cloud, public cloud period. The private cloud idea is gone or mostly gone. When I think about private clouds, it's really VmWare. We have virtualized instances that sitting there. >> What's OpenStack? >> OpenStack is fine, but how many are running OpenStack as a private cloud premise? >> Yeah, so what's OpenStack then? >> When I think of OpenStack, Oracles public cloud. Oracle is not here surprisingly. Oracle's public cloud, Larry Ellison, who I know you guys have spoken to more than once on theCUBE at various points on Oracle World and other things. Oracle's public cloud, they want to compete against AWS. That's all. OpenStack IBM cloud, all OpenStack. The various big providers out of China are OpenStack based. OEH is here. So that's where it fits in is that underlying infrastructure layer. Walmart uses it. Bestbuy, all these other places, Comcast, et cetera; ATT. But individual enterprises, not so much. I have a hard time finding individual enterprises that will tell me we are running our own private cloud as OpenStack. They will tell me they're running VmWare, they will tell me they're running REV or even some flavor of Citrix end server, but not a private cloud. They may have some kind of instances and they will burst out, but it's not, I don't think private cloud for mid tier enterprises ever took off the way some people thought five years ago. >> That's interesting. Let's go meta for a second. You talked about things you do and don't write about, you don't necessarily write the VC's are not here necessarily, but you don't write about necessarily financial stuff. >> Sometimes. There was actually at the Portland summit, I did a panel with press and analysts at the time and afterwards there might have been four different VC's that came up to me and asked me what I thought about different companies. They were looking at different things where they would invest. And I remember, we looked at the board and one VC who shall remain nameless, and I said you know what, we'll look at this board with all these companies and five years from now, three quarters of them will not be here. I think I was probably wrong because it is more than that. There are so many. I wrote a story, I don't remember the exact name of it, but I wrote a story not that long ago about OpenStack deadpool. There are so, multiple companies that raised funding that disappeared. In the networking space, there were things like Plumgrid, they mminorly acquired for assets by Vmware, if I'm not mistaken. There was Pivotal, Joshua McKenzie, one of the co-founders of OpenStack itself, got acquired by Cisco. But they would have collapsed perhaps otherwise. Nebula Computing is perhaps, it still shocks me. They raised whatever it was 50 odd million, someone will correct me afterward. Chris Kemp, CTO of NASA who helped start it. Gone. So, there has been tremendous consolidation. I think when VC's lose money, they lose interest really fast. The other thing you have to think about, from the VC side, they don't write too much on the financial. My good friend Fredrick, who didn't make it, Where are you, Fredrick, where are you? Does more on that funding side. But has there been a big exit for an OpenStack company? Not really, not really. And without that kind of thing, without that precedence it's a tough thing, especially for a market that is now eight years old, give or take. >> Even the exits that had a decent exit, you know that got bought into the say IBM's, Cisco's of the world, and when you look a couple of years later, there's not much left of those organizations. >> Yeah. It's also really hard. People really don't want to compete against, well, some people want to compete against AWS. But, if you're going to try to go toe to toe with them, it's a challenge. >> Okay, so what brings you back here every year? You're speaking at the show. You're talking to people. >> What brings me back here is regardless of the fact that momentum has probably shifted, it's not in that really hype stage, OpenStack's core infrastructure, literally, core infrastructure that runs important assets. Internet assets, whether it certain public cloud vendors, large Fortune 500 companies, or otherwise. So it's an important piece of the stack, whether it's in the hype cycle or not, so that brings me back, because it's important. It brings me back because I have a vested interest. I have written so much about it so I'm curious to see how it continues to evolve. Specifically, I'm speaking here on Thursday doing a panel on defending Cloud Counsel Security as a core competence, a core interest for me. With all these OpenStack assets out there, how they're defended or not is a critical interest. In the modern world, cyber attacks are a given. Everybody should assume they're always under a constant state of attack and how that security works is a core area of interest and why I will keep coming back. I will also keep coming back because I expect there to be another shift. I don't think we have heard the end of the OpenStack story yet. I think the shift towards open infrastructure will evolve a little bit and will come to an interesting conclusion. >> Alright, last thing is what's your favorite question you're asking at this show. Any final things you want to ask us as we wrap? >> Yeah, my favorite, well, I want to ask you guys, what the most interesting answer you got from all the great people you interviewed because I'm sure some of it was negative and you got mostly positive as well. >> Well, we aren't used to answering the questions Stu. >> I'm used to being on the other side here, right. >> Well, I do say we got a lot of stuff about some interesting and juicy cases, like I say, the practitioners I talked to were real. I was always impressed by how few administrators it takes to run a huge OpenStack based cloud once it's set up. I think that's something interesting to me. You asked some folks about a public cloud a lot. >> Yeah, so it has been interesting. For me, it's, we've reached that certain maturity level. I was looking at technology. What's kind of the watermark that this is going to come to? We had said years ago, I don't think you're going to have somebody selling a billion dollars worth of distribution on OpenStack. So, that story with how Kubernetes and Containers and everything fits in, OpenStack is part of the picture, and it might not be the most exciting thing, but then again, if you watch Linux as long as most of us have, Red Hat took a really long time to get a billion dollars and it was much more than just Linux that got them there. This still has the opportunity to be tooling inside the environment. We have talked to a number of users that use it. It's in there. It's not that the flagpole, we're an OpenStack company anymore because there really aren't many companies saying that that is the core of their mission, but that is still an important piece of the overall fabric of what we are covering. >> Exactly right. >> Alright, we on that note, Sean Michael Kerner, we really appreciate you joining us. Please support good technology journalism because it is people like him that help us understand the technology. I read his stuff all the time and always love chatting with him off the record and dragged him on here and Fredrick from Techron Show we are disappointed you could not join us, but we'll get you next time. For Jon Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, be sure to join us for the third day tomorrow of three days of wall to wall live coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. And once again, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost here John Troyer. And we're at the OpenStack Summit 2018, here in Vancouver. One of the key topics we've been discussing, actually for a few years but under new branding, and it's really matured a bit is Edge Computing. So, we're really happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. We have Arturo Suarez, who's a program director with Canonical. We also have first time Kontron employee on, Eric Sarault, who's a product manager of software and services with, I believe Montreal based, is the headquarters. >> That's correct. >> Stu: So, thank you for allowing all of us to come up to Canada and have some fun. >> It's a pleasure. >> But we were all working during Victoria Day, right? >> Yeah. >> All right. Arturo, we know Canonical. So, we're going to talk about where you fit in. But, Eric, let's start with Kontron. I've got a little bit of background with them. I worked in really kind of the TelCo space back in the 90s. But for people that don't know Kontron maybe give us some background. So, basically, the entity here today is representing the communications business unit. So, what we do on that front is mostly TelCo's service providers. We also have strong customer base in the media vertical. But right now the OpenStack, what we're focusing on, is really on the Edge, mixed messages as well. So, we're really getting about delivering the true story about Edge because everybody has their own version of Edge. Everybody has their own little precisions about it. But down the road, it's making sure that we align everyone towards the same messaging so that we deliver a unified solution so that everybody understands what it is. >> Yeah. So, my filter on this has been Edge depends who you are. If you're a telecommunications vendor, when we've talked about the Cohen, it's the Edge of where they sit. If I'm an enterprise, it's the Edge is more like the IOT devices and sometimes there's an aggregation box in between. So, there's somewhere between two and four Edges out there. It's like cloud. We spent a bunch of years discussing it and then we just put the term to the side and go things. When you're talking Edge at Kontron, what does that mean? You actually have devices. >> We do. >> So, who's your customer? What does the Edge look like? >> So, we do have customers on that front. Right now we're working with some big names out there. Basically delivering solutions for 12 inch depth racks at the bottom of radio towers or near cell sites. And ultimately working our way up closer to what would look like, what I like to call a "closet" data center, if you will. Where we also have a platform with multiple systems that's able to be hosted in the environment. So, that's really about not only having one piece of the equation but really being able to get closer to the data center. >> All right. And Arturo, help bring us in because we know Canonical's a software company. What's the Edge mean to your customers and where does Canonical fit? >> So, Canonical, we take pride of being an ubiquitous platform, right? So, it doesn't matter where the Edge, or what the Edge is, right? There is an Ubuntu platform. There is an Ubuntu operating system for every single domain of compute, going from the very end of the Edge. That device that sits on your house or that drone that is flying around. And you need to do some application businesses, or to post on application businesses with, all the way to the core rank. Our OpenStack story starts at the core. But it's interesting as it goes farther from that core, how the density, it's an important factor in how you do things, so. We are able, with Kontron, to provide an operating system and tooling to tackle several of those compute domains that are part of the cloud where real estate is really expensive, right. >> Eric, so you all are a systems developer? Is that a fair two-word phrase? It's hardware and software? >> Basically, we do our original design. >> Okay. I know where I am. >> Manufacturing. >> So, I'm two steps away from hardware. So, I think of those as all systems. But you build things? >> Eric: Correct. >> And you work with software. I think for folks that have been a little more abstract, you tend to think, "Well, in those towers, there must be some bespoke chips and some other stuff but nothing very sophisticated." At this point we're running, or that your customers are running, full OpenStack installations on your system hardware. >> Eric: Correct. >> That's in there and it's rugged and it's upgradable. Can you talk a little bit about the business impact, of that sort of thing, as you go out and work with your customers? >> Certainly. So, one of the challenges that we saw there was really that, from a hardware perspective, people didn't really think about making sure that, once the box is shipped, how do you get the software on it, right. Typically, it's a push and forget approach. And this is where we saw a big gap, that it doesn't make any sense for folks to figure that on their own. A lot of those people out there are actually application developers. They don't have the networking background. They don't have a hardware engineering background. And the last thing they want to be doing is spending weeks, if not months, figuring out how to deploy OpenStack, or Kubernetes, or other solutions out there. So, that's where we leverage Canonical's tools, including MAAS and Juju, to really deploy that easily, at scale, and automated. Along with packaging some documentation, some proper steps on how to deploy the environment quickly in a few hours instead of just sitting there scratching your head and trying to figure it out, right. Because that's the last thing they want. The minute they have the box in their hand they already want to consume the resources and get up and running, so. That's really the mission we want to tackle that you're not going to see from most hardware vendors out there. >> Yeah, it's interesting. We often talk about scale, and our term, it's a very different scale when you talk about how fast it's deployed. We're not talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of cores for one environment. It's way more distributed. >> Yeah. It's a different type of scale. It's still a scale but the building block is different, right. So, we take the orders of magnitude more of points of presence than there are data centers, right. At that scale, and the farther you go again from the core, the larger the scale it is. But the building block is different. And the ability to play, the price of the compute is different. It goes much higher, right? So, going back again, that ability to condense in OpenStack, the ability to deliver a Kubernetes within that little space, is pretty unique, right? And while we're still figuring out what technology goes on the Edge, we still need to account for, as Eric said, the economics of that Edge play a big, big part of that gain, right. So, there is a scale, it's in the thousands of points of presence, in the hundreds of thousands of points of presence, or different buildings where you can put an Edge cloud, or the use-case are still being defined, but it's scaled on a different building block. >> Well, Arturo, just to clarify for myself, sometimes when you're looking at an OpenStack component diagram, there's a lot of components and I don't know how many nodes I'm going to have to run. And they're all talking to each other. But at the Edge, even though there's powerful hardware there, there's an overhead consideration, right? >> Yes. Absolutely and that's going to be there. And OpenStack might evolve but might not evolve. But this is something we are tackling today, right. That's why I love the fact that Kontron has also a Kubernetes cluster, right. That multi-technology, the real multi-cloud is a multi-technology approach to the Edge, right. There are all the things that we can put in the Edge and the access is set. It's not defined. We need to know exactly how much room you have, how you make the most out of each of your cores or each of the gigs of RAM out there. So, OpenStack obviously is heavy for some parts of the Edge. Kontron, with our help, has pushed that to the minimum Openstack viable that allows you not to roll a track when you need to do something on that location, right. As that is as effective as it can get today. >> Eric, can you help put this in a framework of cloud, in general. When I think of Edge, a lot of it data's going to need to go back to data centers or a public cloud, multiple public cloud providers. How do your customers deal with that? Are you using Kubernetes to help them span between public cloud and the Edge? >> So, it's a mix of both. Right now we're doing some work to see how you can utilize idle processing time, along with Kubernetes scheduling and orchestration capabilities. But also OpenStack really caters to the more traditional SDNN of the use-case out there to run your traditional applications. So, that's two things that we get out of the platform. But it's also understanding how much data do you want to go back to the data center and making sure that most of the processing is as close as possible. That goes along with 5G, of course. You literally don't have the time to go back to the data centers. So, it's really about putting those capabilities, whether it's FPGAs, GPUs, and those platform, and really enabling that as close as possible to the Edge, or the end user, should I say. >> Eric, I know you're in the carrier space. Can you talk a little, maybe Kontron in general? And maybe how you, in your career as you go the next decades looking at imbed-able technology everywhere, and what do you all see as the vision of where we're headed? >> Oh, wow. That's a hell of a question. >> That's a big question to throw on you. >> I think it's very interesting to see where things are going. There's a lot of consolidation. And you have all these opensource project that needs to work together. The fact that OpenStack is embracing the reality that Kubernetes is going to be there to drive workloads. And they're not stepping on each others' throat, not even near. So, this is where the collaboration, between what we're seeing from the OpenStack Foundation along with the projects from the Linux Foundation, this is really, really interesting to see this moving forward. Other projects upcoming, like ONAP and Akraino, it's going to be very interesting for the next 24 months, to see what it's going to shape into. >> One of the near things, you mentioned 5G and we've been watching, what's available, how that roll-out's going to go into the various pieces. Is this ecosystem ready for that? Going to take advantage of it? And how soon until it is real for customers? >> The hardware is ready. That's for sure. It's really going to be about making sure if you have a split environment that's based on X86, or a split with ARM, it's going to be about making sure that these environments can interact with each other. The service chaining is probably the most complicated aspect there is to what people want to be doing there. And there's a bit of a tie, rope-pulling, from one side to another still but it's finally starting to put in to play. So, I think that the fact that Akraino, which is going to bring a version of OpenStack within the Linux Foundation, this is going to be really unlocking the capabilities that are out there to deploy the solution. And tying along with that, with hardware that has a single purpose, that's able to cater all the use-cases, and not just think about one vertical. "And then this box does this and this other box does another use-case." I think that's the pitfall that a lot of vendors fallen into. Instead of just, "Okay, for a second think outside the box. How many applications could you fit in this footprint?" And there probably going to be big data and multiple use-cases, that are nowhere near each other. So, don't try to do this very specific platform and just make sure that you're able to cater pretty much everyone. It's probably going to do the job, right, so. >> There's over 40 sessions on Edge Computing here. Why don't we just give both of you the opportunity to give us a closing remarks on the importance of Edge, what you're seeing here at the show, and final takeaways. >> From our side, from the Canonical side again, the Edge is whatever is not core. That really has different domains of compute. There is an Ubuntu for each of one of those domains. As Eric mentioned, this is important because you have a common platform, not only in the hardware perspective or the orchestrating technologies and their needs, which are evolving fast. And we have the ability, because how we are built, to accommodate or to build on all of those technologies. And be able to allow developers to choose what they want to do or how they want to do it. Try and try again, in different types of technologies and finally get to that interesting thing, right. There is that application layer that still needs to be developed to make the best use out of the existing technologies. So, it's going to be interesting to see how applications and the technologies evolve together. And we are in a great position as a common platform to all of those compute domains on all of those technologies from the economical perspective. >> On our side, what we see, it's really about making sure it's a density play. At the Edge, and the closer you go to these more wild environments, it's not data centers with 30 kilowatts per rack. You don't have the luxury of putting in, what I like to call whiteboards, 36 inch servers or open-compute systems. So, we really want to make sure that we're able to cater to that. We do have the products for it along with the technologies that Canonical are bringing in on that front. We're able to easily roll-out multiple types of application for those different use-cases. And, ultimately, it's all going to be about density, power efficiency, and making sure that your time to production with the environment is as short as possible. Because the minute they'll want access to that platform, you need to be ready to roll it out. Otherwise, you're going to be lagging behind. >> Eric and Arturo, thanks so much for coming on the program and giving us all the updates on Edge Computing here. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (exciting music)

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, The OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. It's Victoria Day, but we're working. So for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to welcome back to the program, we've got Tim Burke who's the Vice President of Infrastructure and Cloud Engineering with Red Hat, and fresh off the keynote stage we have Mark McLoughlin who's the Senior Director of Engineering for OpenStack, also with Red Hat. Gentleman, thank you so much for joining us. >> Our pleasure, thank you. >> Thank you. All right, so Mark, I'll start with you. Keynote stage, you had a good discussion about, we were talking about open source, talking about community, is the themes that we heard at Red Hat Summit last weekend and again here at OpenStack. It's a nice couple of years in a row we've had the back-to-back of those two shows, so give us a little bit encapsulation of that message. >> Sure, I mean the key message of the keynote, really, was talking about the overlapping missions between the OpenStack and Kubernetes and really kind of showing how they come together for our customers and for users generally in terms of tackling that kind of broad, open infrastructure challenge of trying to give businesses the opportunity to be free from the infrastructure providers in terms of being able to switch between infrastructure providers and also OpenStack in terms of its role offering kind of on-premise infrastructure as an alternative to the public cloud. >> Yeah, Tim, I want to get your viewpoint on some things. It's interesting, we talk about we're at the OpenStack show but we're talking about containers, we're talking about edge computing. I think about one of the other foundations, The Linux Foundation does way more than Linux these days. They're doing all the cloud native things. Reminds me a lot of Red Hat themselves, broad spectrum of products. Sometimes it can almost get a little bit overwhelming for most people to say, "Oh my god, "there's so many projects, there's so many products. "How do you help me get to where I need to go "and where I need to go tomorrow?" What are you hearing from customers? How do you manage that? >> I think a lot of this mirrors Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and back when we started it was the day of the Unix wars, right? And in the early days of Linux it was this big challenge of getting your graphics drivers and putting all these pieces together, right? And now today it's more about broader infrastructure orchestration. And you see Mark Collier, for example, from The OpenStack Foundation started today showing a list of 30 different components that you have to piece together. And really, I think that that's what Red Hat focuses on, is two things. It's one, is where do we want to take the technology tomorrow through our open source fund, ranging from Linux to OpenStack and Ceph Filesystems, for example. But it's not just that. It's how do you get these pieces to work together? And I think that that's something that hasn't traditionally been the strength of the open source community because they may stick into these silos of operation. And I think that Red Hat's focus and strength right now is to do what we did for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the OpenStack space by pulling all of these pieces together in a consumable and supported manner. >> Yeah, it's funny you mention getting graphics cards in. Come on, with the Queen's announcement we now have the virtual GPU support, so it feels like, but you know what, we've come so far yet. We're doing some of the same things over again. What are you hearing that's just massively different about kind of the state of open source today? And we just had one of your customers on talking about their digital transformation. >> I think what's really changed over the years in open source is I think it started out, honestly, as a clone. It was like can we compete with the likes of Solaris, right? And so it was, I'd call it catch up for innovation. Now you look at open source. It's not catching up, it's leading all the innovation today whether it's all the major public clouds are based on open source technologies. When we started open source was unproven and many customers were skeptical of consuming it. Now you're seeing customers, governments, all sorts of different businesses demanding open source because they want choice, they don't want to be locked into any one vendor, and they want to be able to work collaboratively to harness the power. And I think that collective collaborative model has really pretty proven its effectiveness. >> Mark, I wanted to talk a little bit about OpenStack itself. I think last year at OpenStack Summit there was a lot of talk. People seemed to be a little bit confused or at least there was a lot of interesting architectural conversations, containers on top, containers on the bottom, what sits on the bare metal. This year both at Red Hat Summit and here and even in the industry at large I think a lot of that conversation has clarified. There's the (laughs) application layer and there's an infrastructure layer which does very hard things that the application layer does not have to worry about. How are you looking at OpenStack as a citizen of the industry and of the Stack connections with other open source and taking care of that infrastructure piece in 2018, right, which is, we're pretty far from where we started. >> No, great points. To highlight those architectural discussions and really trying to figure out the kind of layering there obviously kind of approach OpenStack as kind of the best tool for managing your infrastructure, getting your infrastructure under control, making it scalable, making it automatable, and then building an application platform on top of that. I may have confused the architectural discussion a little bit this morning with the keynote because what we actually showed in the keynote was on the rack on stage we had an OpenStack cloud running on bare metal and then we would end deploying Kubernetes. Our open shift distribution, we were deploying that also on bare metal alongside OpenStack. Whereas I think often people would assume if you're going to do Kubernetes on OpenStack you're going to do it in virtual machines that are managed by OpenStack. But we were actually showing how you can use OpenStack to manage the bare metal, that you're actually running Kubernetes directly on the bare metal but that there's still integration between Kubernetes and OpenStack when they're side by side. So maybe confused the architectural discussion a little bit more but I think it's really trying to highlight that that assumption of running Kubernetes inside virtual machines isn't necessary. >> You used one of my favorite tools in your keynote. You used Venn diagrams because it is not a thing over here and a thing over here. There's overlap and there's decisions that you'll make, and lots of customers want a platform that will guide them down that path. And they also, oh wait, but I have this custom thing that I need to do. What's the biggest problem we have in IT, is it's not standardized and nothing ever gets thrown away. It's like I want to run my docker image on a z/VM in a mainframe. Oh, Walmart does that, but they also have an OpenStack deployment. So (laughs) you hear all of these discussions out there where it's like wait, is this, you know, (laughs) is this the main thing? Is this modified? What sits on what and where? So it's and, it seems to be, and there's a lot of choices. >> Absolutely, and I think one of the really, you know, one of the really interesting things when you're working in this space is you realize that customers are making really long-term strategic decisions appear. The example I used today was BBVA, and they realized that they needed to kind of keep up with a fast-changing market and they needed an internal platform to allow them to do that. And this is about them making a long-term decision about how they were going to build that platform into the, it's a really kind of long-term and basing their business on that and its future. So that's, it's kind of humbling in terms of having that responsibility of making that work. >> Yeah, Tim, maybe we can get your comments on the ecosystem. We sure have watched three years ago when we were here HP had a big army coming in here as to they doing their distribution. Well, HP's a hardware, HPE, I should say as they are now (laughs) is a hardware partner. Red Hat works across all of the traditional infrastructure companies. This ecosystem changed. Red Hat has a broad ecosystem. What are you seeing out there? What do you get from the partners that they're asking, and how does that play? >> Yeah, I think this really, again, mirrors our approach to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And so if you look at all the different dimensions of compute, network, and storage, we have ecosystem partners in all of those. So we have the likes for storage, we have NetApp, EMC, IBM, many others. We have backup vendors like Trilio in on that. On the network front we have Cisco, Juniper, many others. We have ecosystem partners of all the major hardware OEMs. We have ecosystem partners in Innovee and Telco, all those spaces. So I think what really is the main driver of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the ecosystem. It's not really the kernel anymore. It's like how do you run a consistent platform across multiple footprints? And that's what Red Hat is trying to provide because today I see there is a risk of vendor lock, and just like back in the day it was mainframe, right? Try to get everything from the lowest layer to the top layer on one platform. Many of the public cloud vendors are trying to be that one-stop shop, almost analogous to the mainframe. And what we're trying to do just like we did before for his ecosystem is to provide through leveraging the power of open source a platform that people can run, a hybrid platform that they can accelerate their business not only on all the different public clouds but also on-premise as well. >> It's interesting, last week of course big announcement with Red Hat is Microsoft's up on stage. It was like cats and dogs living together. Year before, Amazon you had a big announcement with. With Kubernetes and so many of these different tools, yes, there's that vertical integration but most of the companies understand that they're going to be in a customer environment and other people are. There's no longer, it's oh, IBM of 50 years ago where I'm going to be full in on that chop. >> Right, and I see Kubernetes is also, it's a huge open source project. So this is the difference between upstream and productization. It's what Red Hat does, is we do our maintenance, our support, our hardening, creation of this ecosystem, long life cycle support. The same thing's going to happen in Kubernetes where it's you don't just grab it upstream and run with whatever happens to be in it. And I think that there's a lot of companies that are claiming that just that Kubernetes is ubiquitous. And it's like the community innovation is ubiquitous and we're all in for advancing that. But it's really, if you're going to bet your business you want something that's productized and hardened by a contributor that you can trust. >> Well Tim, I want to connect that back with some of the other stuff that we've talked about on stage today. RHEL, super solid, history of engineering. The lower levels of your Stack need to be solid because you depend (laughs) on them. We talked a little bit about, on stage, about upgrades and things like that and how people are moving forward, the release schedule. I don't know, Mark, how are you approaching both upgrades and automation with Ansible? But other, OpenStack has other components too. How are you approaching that in the OpenStack day two to day 1000 scenario? >> Well absolutely, great question because today we've just announced our upcoming Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 release, and that's our long life cycle release. So our last long life cycle release was version 10, and we've had a couple of shorter life versions in between. But when it comes to the upstream community what's supported in terms of upgrade is between those individual versions. When we came out with version 13, with this long life version, we have to support seamless upgrades between 10 and 13 in place without disrupting workloads that are running in your environment and make it completely smooth and seamless. And we're doing that with a feature called fast forward upgrades which is completely automated with Ansible. So that's been a big part of our focus with our engineering investment for open-- >> Ansible came up a couple of times on stage both with Zuul and also with the fast forward upgrades and it might have slipped in there a couple more times. It seems like Ansible is a big part of even this community. >> No, we're very happy with Ansible and it's a really powerful tool when it comes to automation. Got an amazing community around us. Kind of real, it's been a kind of an organic growth and we've been really happy with the team since they've joined Red Hat. It's a great foundation for everything we're doing. >> And Ansible's not just a foundation with an OpenStack. It's, for example, we have Ceph integration in with Ansible. We have OpenShift is how we deploy it using Ansible. It's how we're using NREL to what we call System Roles to be able to make it easier to upgrade from one to the other. So by combining a single technology it's making it easier for us to put together an integrated portfolio. >> Great, Tim, when people leave this show what are some of the key messages you want to make sure that they've heard from Red Hat as part of this community? >> I would say that it's Red Hat is bringing an integrated portfolio Stack because it's not just about components. It's really about how can you build, develop, and deploy applications rapidly and what's the most enterprise-ready dynamic environment that enables you to do that, and that's what we think that the power of Red Hat through its credibility in the open source community to bring all of those pieces of the Stack together from top to bottom. >> Stu: All right, and Mark, we'll give you the final word. >> Yeah, I'd actually reach for what we're reinforcing a lot on this summit. We're talking about innovate, empower, and accelerate, and that's really about these businesses that are our customers who are dealing with the challenge of trying to keep up with a rapidly changing market. And they need to innovate more. They need to move faster, need to accelerate. But they also need to empower their own application developers to do that innovation, to really kind of keep pace with the market. >> All right, well Tim Burke, Mark McLoughlin, thanks so much for all of the updates here. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with much more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music) (slow tones playing)

>> Announcer: Live, fro-- >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada it's theCUBE! Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi and welcome to SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. We're here for three days of live wall-to-wall coverage at the OpenStack Foundation's show they have it twice a year John, pleasure to be with you again, you and I were together at the OpenStack show in Boston, a year ago, little bit further trip for me. But views like this, I'm not complaining. >> It's a great time to be in Vancouver, little bit overcast but the convention center's beautiful and the people seem pretty excited as well. >> Yeah so if you see behind us, the keynote let out. So John, we got to get into the first question of course for some reason the last month people are always Hey Stu where are you, what're you doing and when I walk through the various shows I'm doing when it comes to this one they're like, why are you going to the OpenStack show? You know, what's going on there, hasn't that been replaced by everything else? >> I got the same thing, there seems to be kind of a almost an antireligious thing here in the industry maybe more emotional perhaps at other projects. Although frankly look, we're going to take the temperature of the community, we're going to take the temperature of the projects, the customers, we got a lot of customers here, that's really the key here is that our people actually using this, being productive, functional, and is there enough of a vendor and a community ecosystem to make this go forward. >> Absolutely, so three years ago, when we were actually here in Vancouver, the container sessions were overflowing, people sitting in the aisles. You know containers, containers, containers, docker, docker, docker, you know, we went through a year or two of that. Then Kubernetes, really a wave that has taken over, this piece of the infrastructure stack, the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon shows, in general, I think have surpassed this size, but as we know in IT, nothing ever dies, everything is always additive, and a theme that I heard here that definitely resonated is, we have complexity, we need to deal with interoperability, everybody has a lot of things and that's the, choose your word, hybrid, multi-cloud world that you have, and that's really the state of opensource, it's not a thing, it's there's lots of things you take all the pieces you need and you figure out how to put 'em together, either buy them from a platform, you have some integrator that helps, so somebody that puts it all together, and that's where, you know, we live here, which is, by they way, I thought they might rename the show in the open, and they didn't, but there's a lot of pieces to discuss. >> Definitely an open infrastructure movement, we'll probably talk about that, look I loved the message this morning that the cloud is not consolidating, in fact it's getting more complicated, and so that was a practical message here, it's a little bit of a church of opensource as well, so the open message was very well received and, these are the people that are working on it, of course, but yeah, the fact that, like last year I thought in Boston, there was a lot of, almost confusion around containers, and where containers and Kubernetes fit in the whole ecosystem, I think, now in this year in 2018 it's a lot more clear and OpenStack as a project, or as a set of projects, which traditionally was, the hit on it was very insular and inward facing, has at least, is trying to become outward facing, and again that's something we'll be looking at this week, and how well will they integrate with other opensource projects. >> I mean John, you and I are both big supporters of the opensource movements, love the community at shows like this, but not exclusively, it's, you know, Amazon participating a little bit, using a lot of opensource, they take opensource and make it as a service, you were at Red Hat Summit last week, obviously huge discussion there about everything opensource, everything, so a lot going on there, let me just set for, first of all the foundation itself in this show, the thing that I liked, coming into it, one of the things we're going to poke at is, if I go up to the highest level, OpenStack is not the only thing here, they have a few tracks they have an Edge computer track, they have a container track, and there's a co-resident OpenDev Show happening a couple floors above us and, even from what the OpenStack Foundation manages, yes it OpenStack's the main piece of it, and all those underlying projects but, they had Katacontainers, which is, you know, high level project, and the new one is Zuul, talking about CI/CD, so there are things that, will work with OpenStack but not exclusively for OpenStack, might not even come from OpenStack, so those are things that we're seeing, you know, for example, I was at the Veeam show last week, and there was a software company N2WS that Veeam had bought, and that solution only worked on Amazon to start and, you know, I was at the Nutanix show the week before, and there's lots of things that start in the Amazon environment and then make their way to the on-premises world so, we know it's a complex world, you know, I agree with you, the cloud is not getting simpler, remember when cloud was: Swipe the credit card and it's super easy, the line I've used a lot of times is, it is actually more complicated to buy, quote, a server equivalent, in the public could, than it is if I go to the website and have something that's shipped to my data center. >> It's, yeah, it's kind of ironic that that's where we've ended up. You know, we'll see, with Zuul, it'll be very interesting, one of the hits again on OpenStack has been reinvention of the wheel, like, can you inter-operate with other projects rather than doing it your self, it sounds like there's some actually, some very interesting aspects to it, as a CI/CD system, and certainly it uses stuff like Ansible so it's, it's built using opensource components, but, other opensource components, but you know, what does this give us advantage for infrastructure people, and allowing infrastructure to go live in a CI/CD way, software on hardware, rather than, the ones that've been built from the dev side, the app side. I'm assuming there's good reasons, or they wouldn't've done it, but you know, we'll see, there's still a lot of projects inside the opensource umbrella. >> Yeah, and, you know, last year we talked about it, once again, we'll talk about it here, the ecosystem has shifted. There are some of the big traditional infrastructure companies, but what they're talking about has changed a lot, you know. Remember a few years ago, it was you know, HP, thousand people, billion dollar investment, you know, IBM has been part of OpenStack since the very beginning days, but it changes, even a company like Rackspace, who helped put together this environment, the press release that went was: oh, we took all the learnings that we did from OpenStack, and this is our new Kubernetes service that we have, something that I saw, actually Randy Bias, who I'll have on the show this week, was on, the first time we did this show five years ago, can't believe it's the sixth year we're doing the show, Randy is always an interesting conversation to poke some of the sacred cows, and, I'll use that analogy, of course, because he is the one that Pets vs Cattle analogy, and he said, you know, we're spending a lot of time talking about it's not, as you hear, some game, between OpenStack and Kubernetes, containers are great, isn't that wonderful. If we're talking about that so much, maybe we should just like, go do that stuff, and not worry about this, so it'll be fun to talk to him, the Open Dev Show is being, mainly, sponsored by Mirantis who, last time I was here in Vancouver was the OpenStack company, and now, like, I saw them a year ago, and they were, the Kubernetes company, and making those changes, so we'll have Boris on, and get to find out these companies, there's not a lot of ECs here, the press and analysts that are here, most of us have been here for a lot of time so, this ecosystem has changed a lot, but, while attendance is down a little bit, from what I've heard, from previous years, there's still some good energy, people are learning a lot. >> So Stu, I did want to point out, that something I noticed on the stage, that I didn't see, was a lot of infrastructure, right? OpenStack, clearly an infrastructure stack, I think we've teased that out over the past couple years, but I didn't see a lot of talk about storage subsystems, networking, management, like all the kind of, hard, infrastructure plumbing, that actually, everybody here does, as well as a few names, so that was interesting, but at the end of the day, I mean, you got to appeal to the whole crowd here. >> Yeah, well one of the things, we spent a number of years making that stuff work, back when it was, you know, we're talkin' about gettin' Cinder, and then all the storage companies lined up with their various, do we support it, is it fully integrated, and then even further, does it actually work really well? So, same stuff that went through, for about a decade, in virtualization, we went through this in OpenStack, we actually said a couple years ago, some of the basic infrastructure stuff has gotten boring, so we don't need to talk about it anymore. Ironic, it's actually the non-virtualized environments, that's the project that they have here, we have a lot of people who are talking bare metal, who are talking containers, so that has shifted, an interesting one in the keynote is that you had the top level sponsors getting up there, Intel bringing around a lot of their ecosystem partners, talking about Edge, talking about the telecommunications, Red Hat, giving a recap of what they did last week at their summit, they've got a nice cadence, the last couple of years, they've done Red Hat Summit, and OpenStack Summit, back-to-back so that they can get that flow of information through, and then Mark Shuttleworth, who we'll have on a little bit later today, he came out puchin', you know, he started with some motherhood in Apple Pi about how Ubuntu is everywhere but then it was like, and we're going to be so much cheaper, and we're so much easier than the VMwares and Red Hats of the world, and there was a little push back from the community, that maybe that wasn't the right platform to do it. >> Yeah, I think the room got kind of cold, I mean, that's kind of a church in there, right, and everyone is an opensource believer and, this kind of invisible hand of capitalism (laughs) reached in and wrote on the wall and, you know, having written and left. But at the end of the day, right, somebody's got to pay for babies new shoes. I think that it was also very interesting seeing, at Red Hat Summit, which I covered on theCUBE, Red Hat's argument was fairly philosophical, and from first principles. Containers are Linux, therefore Red Hat, and that was logically laid out. Mark's, actually I loved Mark's, most of his speech, which was very practical, this, you know, Ubuntu's going to make both OpenStack and containers simpler, faster, quicker, and cheaper, so it was clearly benefits, and then, for the folks that don't know, then he put up a couple a crazy Eddy slides like, limited time offer, if you're here at the show, here's a deal that we've put together for ya, so that was a little bit unusual for a keynote. >> Yeah, and there are a lot of users here, and some of them'll hear that and they'll say: yeah, you know, I've used Red Hat there but, you can save me money that's awesome, let me find out some more about it. Alright, so, we've got three days of coverage here John, and we get to cover this really kind of broad ecosystem that we have here. You talked about what we don't discuss anymore, like the major lease was Queens, and it used to be, that was where I would study up and be like oh okay, we've got Hudson, and then we got, it was the letters of the alphabet, what's the next one going to be and what are the major features it's reached a certain maturity level that we're not talking the release anymore, it's more like the discussions we have in cloud, which is sometimes, here's some of the major things, and oh yeah, it just kind of wraps itself in. Deployments still, probably aren't nearly as easy as we'd like, Shuttleworth said two guys in under two weeks, that's awesome, but there's solutions we can put, stand up much faster than that now, two weeks is way better than some of the historical things we've done, but it changes quite a bit. So, telecommunications still a hot topic, Edge is something, you know what I think back, it was like, oh, all those NFE conversations we've had here, it's not just the SDN changes that are happening, but this is the Edge discussion for the Telcos, and something people were getting their arms around, so. >> It's pretty interesting to think of the cloud out on telephone poles, and in branch offices, in data centers, in closets basically or under desks almost. >> No self-driving cars on the keynote stage though? >> No, nothing that flashy this year. >> No, definitely not too flashy so, the foundation itself, it's interesting, we've heard rumors that maybe the show will change name, the foundation will not change names. So I want to give you last things, what're you looking for this week, what were you hearing from the community leading up to the show that you want to validate or poke at? >> Well, I'm going to look at real deployments, I'd like to see how standard we are, if we are, if an OpenStack deployment is standardized enough that the pool of talent is growing, and that if I hire people from outside my company who work with OpenStack, I know that they can work with my OpenStack, I think that's key for the continuation of this ecosystem. I want to look at the general energy and how people are deploying it, whether it does become really invisible and boring, but still important. Or do you end up running OpenShift on bare metal, which I, as an infrastructure person, I just can't see that the app platform should have to worry about all this infrastructure stuff, 'cause it's complicated, and so, I'll just be looking for the healthy productions and production deployments and see how that goes. >> Yeah, and I love, one of the things that they started many years ago was they have a super-user category, where they give an award, and I'm excited, we have actually have the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research is one of our guests on today, they won the 2018 super-user group, it's always awesome when you see, not only it's like, okay, CERN's here, and they're doing some really cool things looking for the Higgs boson, and all those kind of things but, you know, companies that are using technology to help them attack the battle against cancer, so, you know, you can't beat things like that. We've got the person from the keynote, Melvin, who was up on stage talking about the open lab, you know, community, ecosystem, definitely something that resonates, I know, one of the reasons I pulled you into this show in the last year is you're got a strong background there. >> Super impressed by all the community activity, this still feels like a real community, lots of pictures of people, lots of real, exhortations from stage to like, we who have been here for years know each other, please come meet us, so that's a real sign of also, a healthy community dynamic. >> Alright, so John first of all, I want to say, Happy Victoria Day, 'cause we are here in Vancouver, and we've got a lot going on here, it's a beautiful venue, hope you all join us for all of the coverage here, and I have to give a big shout out to the companies that allowed this to happen, we are independent media, but we can't survive without the funding of our sponsors so, first of all the OpenStack Foundation, helps get us here, and gives us this lovely location overlooking outside, but if it wasn't for the likes of our headline sponsor Red Hat as well as Canonical, Kontron, and Nuage Networks, we would not be able to bring you this content so, be sure to checkout thecube.net for all the coverage, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. 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